Roberto valducci

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

Lucio Anneo Seneca

DIRECTOR’S NOTE

“Development can’t fly in the face of happiness. It should promote human happiness, love, human relationships, relationships between parents and children, with friends, and basic goods. Precisely. Because this is the most important treasure we have: happiness! When we fight for the environment, we must remember that the first element of the environment is called human happiness!”
Live in austerity to satisfy our standards of living, which we refuse to lower, or, as the former Uruguay President Mujica has claimed for some time now, live in moderation?

In short, is it better to just make cuts everywhere and leave millions of people jobless and without a future, as is the case for the Western world, or consume only what we really need without wasting any resources?

“Because when I buy something,” continues Mujica, “I don’t buy it with money, but with the time of my life it took me to earn that money. And the time of life is precious and must be jealously guarded. We need to keep it for the things we like and motivate us. Having time for yourself is what I call freedom. And if you want to be free, you have to use moderation. The alternative is becoming a slave to work so you can consume ruthlessly, but this takes time away from living your life.”
Today, the world is undergoing change of epoch proportions. There’s no place for those who give in to the current state of things, who allow themselves to be subjugated by an increasingly dog-eat-dog and viscous economy, who don’t want to be free.

Disdain for the way we are governed or exploited or enslaved isn’t enough. We need to find the courage to change things. But, as Camus suggests, first we need to change ourselves, and we need to do it fast, otherwise “our past will devour our future.”

A future where inequalities become impossible to sustain for Western democracies. Without political and economic intervention the near future will seem like the Belle Epoque, when society was dominated by wealthy families and their seven-digit bank accounts. The domination of today’s “nouveau riche” could end up suffocating tomorrow’s societies, their wellbeing, and, above all, “Human Happiness.”

In 1971, I was a student living on the outskirts of Milan. Everyday, I’d commute back and forth to the city center. That year, at the north train station newsstand, I bought a “super-pocket” paperback published by Longanesi. The ones that used to cost 350 Lire.

Even though I knew little about the author, Bertrand Russell, I liked the title, The Conquest of Happiness, and the blurb:

“Break down the hard shell of the Ego that suffocates and impoverishes us, nurture the most pleasant and open-hearted relationships with others, and with things . . . man must enlarge his mind to the universe, and be impassioned by the greatest number of studies and problems, adapting the pace of individual life to the universe’s.”

Forty-five years have passed since that day back in 1971. All these years, that small book has survived moves, at times even turbulent. But it’s always stayed with me. Read countless times, underlined, devoured. Today, many people ask me how I came up with the idea of making such an impossible film like HUMAN HAPPINESS. I really can’t say it was because of that book. It wouldn’t be right. The idea came to me thanks to what I’ve seen after reading it, in the most diverse, afflicted, and complicated places across the world.

Bertrand Russell saw it his own way, and he tried to solve the problem by suggesting “a cure” for the ordinary day-to-day unhappiness. He was able to do so because he lived at a time that was much happier than ours. Well, at least I think so.

Those were years riddled by social conflict. Of course. But nothing, back then, hinted at what is happening today, where everything, everyday, seems swallowed up by the “great world disorder” and by ”religious chaos.”

The film was born precisely from this “disorder” and this “chaos.” And it couldn’t be any other way.

Russell wrote the book based on his experiences. It’s both erudite and intentionally simple because he wanted everyone to understand: “This book is not addressed to the learned . . . ,” he writes in the foreword to The Conquest of Happiness.

From then on, work after work, he accompanies his readers towards elementary and quite pertinent truths: “. . . to be happy you must defend yourself from the gods . . . ” or “a very large part of the evil afflicting the world is due to religious fanaticism . . . ”

Bertrand Russell passed away in 1970. Just one year before I discovered him after reading that 350-Lire paperback. Today, in the film I recently finished, another (French) philosopher, Andrè Comte Sponville, picks up the topic by quoting Michel Serres, one of France’s most important intellectuals: “In order to make my students laugh, I spoke to them about religion and, to get them excited, about politics. That was in 1968. Today, to get them to laugh, I discuss politics and, to excite them, about religion.”

What a disturbing paradox that distances, a great deal, the conquest of happiness.
Maurizio Zaccaro